It's not just expertise that makes you think that the news is misleading. Often times the news actually is misleading, intentionally. I'm not saying the American news media are collectively guilty of lying to the American public, but I think that collectively and severally they deserve a fair trial.
I've been using a Chromebook for a while. I am a web developer. This particular machine does not have Crouton or a standard Linux distribution on it, just the stock OS. I would probably have opted for one of those, but this machine has a broken power button, which prevents it from being put into developer mode. So far I have not run into any insurmountable problems, and I think overall that it has been an improvement in my workflow.
Chrome OS has a number of useful features. The longest part of rebooting or updating the machine is waiting for your browser tabs to reload. You may say that this is uncommon and that you don't care how long it takes, but on the other hand no one will miss that wait time either. Having files backed up automatically is quite pleasant. If and when you are in the unfortunate position of having a machine die on you, sitting down to any Chromebook and typing in your password will restore your files, bookmarks, browser history, desktop background, and all installed programs in a couple minutes. The biggest downside is printing; it's possible if you have another computer or a Cloud Print ready printer (yeah right), but it's not fun under any circumstances.
Either Google Docs or Office Online do a pretty good job of handling office tasks, with one exception: neither will open a password-protected excel spreadsheet. For that I have been using RollApp, which does exactly what it says on the tin but is a bit slow. For web development, Chrome OS includes an SSH client. You don't need more than a VPS and vim, do you? You do? Well, in that case, you should be more than happy with Cloud9 Web-based IDE (Chrome Store link). You get your own little linux environment for each workspace, already set up for various development tasks. The editor is pretty similar to Sublime Text, and cloning projects from GitHub is fast and easy. You can also connect to a private VPS and do whatever crazy things you like there. Loading up a workspace restores all opened files and terminal windows, including any terminal programs/output. Run your tests, close the window, come back a week later, and the test output is still there. If you happened to be exploring something using a CLI interactive interpreter, that will still be running when you get back to it. Also, the workspaces are separate instances: developing locally I would always have to set up a new user, add it to the www-data group, set up its own fcgi pool, add an entry in/etc/hosts, and so on and so forth. Setting up lxc or nspawn containers makes this marginally easier. Letting your IDE handle it for you is brilliant.
Using a Chromebook does not mean giving up your ability to use (or create) complex software, but you will have to change your workflow. There is probably a fair amount of software that is not available on the web or even via SSH, but I think that most people's needs would be satisfied. I left my other Chromebook lying around the house for the roomies to use, and I don't think any of them noticed that it wasn't running Windows -- probably never used it for anything but web browsing. Your IT professional may need a XAMP stack, but he doesn't necessarily need it on a local machine, and there are some real advantages to not doing so, even if you skip the cloud-based IDE and just do a VM.
I have no connection to any company listed above except as a satisfied user.
I don't think that anyone would be so foolish as to say or suggest that THC does not impair driving skills, although the degree of response to THC is much more varied than with alcohol. I'm sorry you read something in my words which you found to be misleading, but I'm glad that you found the linked article to be informative; my goal was to provide more accurate information about the nature of THC intoxication and not to characterize it myself. It is clearly a complicated subject and I didn't want to either quote-mine or take the time to provide a balanced summary.
If I may be allowed to clarify the sentence to which you object, I would say that the GP's comment (the quoted one) was absurd on its face. As they say, the dose makes the poison. There may be some level of THC intoxication which is equivalent (by some measure) to the effects of a.08 BAC, and research in determining that would presumably be worthwhile. Knee-jerk ignorant anti-cannabis rhetoric (or legislation) does not contribute to a reasoned discussion.
Your link is misleading. Yes, marijuana does not do good things to developing brains — there are much better studies which demonstrate this. There is no similar evidence which suggests that either moderate use or use beginning in adulthood has the same effect.
The association presents compelling evidence for white matter reacting differently to cannabis exposure commencing during adolescence compared with adulthood...
One joint does not a pothead make. You've pretty much already missed the boat for pot-related brain damage, but your knee-jerk antagonism against cannabis users is equally as dumb. Even if everything you imagine to be true about cannabis use was in fact the truth,
I think that THC use and Texting while driving should have the exact same penalties as someone who has.08 BAC.
This does not follow. There is no objective evidence suggesting that marijuana is equally impairing, and suggesting that any amount of use or exposure to THC is equivalent to being dangerously impaired is simple prejudice.
When you can drive a starship through the holes in either theory, get back to me. I don't think we're actually in disagreement; I realize I was speaking imprecisely. I hope that you can forgive me a little hyperbole, and I will totally pick you to double-check my physics papers in the future.
No, I was not wrong, I am well aware that certain effects propagate faster than the speed of light. Note that gravity waves have not been directly observed. There are other quantum effects which propagate faster than c, but the fundamental constraint is that nothing can accelerate to or past c, and classical information cannot propagate faster than c. There are solutions to GR equations which allow for spacetime to be bent to the point where something that *looks* like FTL to fall out, but they tend to require exotic matter, and there's no evidence to suggest that said matter exists.
Finally, one must keep in mind that any form of FTL allows for reference frames in which effects precede their causes. You may feel happy living in a universe where causality isn't a thing, but that to me would put unpleasant limits on what is knowable about our universe.
This kind of comment is deeply ignorant and anti-science. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe. If you would rather believe in your own personal fantasies instead of one of the most well-supported theories in science, congratulations, you are yet another variety of religious loon.
Look, it's pretty simple. Science is not magic, and there is shit that it says that is for real-real not for play-play. We don't know what the future will look like in 2050 or 2100, but we can be completely sure of three things:
1) There will be no violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. 2) Nothing (for all important values of nothing) will travel faster than the speed of light. 3) Commercial fusion power will still be 20 years out.
The first two are immutable laws of physics, the final one was proven by a Dr. M. T. Budget. Humor aside, relativity and thermodynamics have been proven at both the largest and smallest scales that humans have been able to observe, and at every level in between. They are not perfect theories, but they do place very hard and very real constraints on what kind of rabbits you can pull out of a given hat. You will not go to intergalactic space today, nor tomorrow, nor while anything recognizable as human exists.
You obviously have no idea why systemd isn't portable. Its whole point of existence is process management using cgroups. Shame on the kernel devs for not writing cgroups into every OS's kernel! Oh wait, that's retarded. And guess what else you can't run on Mac OSX or Windows? Your SysV init scripts. Hell, those aren't usually portable between distributions; systemd is more compatible. You're also wrong about GNOME; their continued policy is to keep the loosest possible dependency on systemd, and that only because they need the features of logind. Write a replacement, and they will use it.
Whenever other kernels support compatible features you can argue about portability. It sounds like you have some code you need to get writing.
So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.
If you can't define why this particular (loosely-defined) bundling is bad, then I submit that it's a matter of opinion, and I for one am confused as to why we're focused on one technology giant as opposed to another. Saying something is anti-consumer is easy; any commercial entity is going to be anti-consumer to some degree, most often to whatever degree they can get away with. Why is market competition not a good criterion here?
I've been using Linux Mint lately, and fucking up my system royally. So I've had to fall back on the LiveUSB installation to repair the system. Mint doesn't get a financial kickback from Google, so they ship Yahoo! as the default search engine instead. This has led me, by accident, to use Yahoo! a few times when looking for information.
I'm not saying that I would rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than use Yahoo! search; that wouldn't make my system boot. Was it worth it to continually type in 'google' and hit Ctrl+Enter before entering a search query? Yes, every single time, and I deeply regretted each lapse in memory. The only reason Firefox might care about Google is if they care about the quality of their search results.
For me, as a web developer, even though the built-in tools in Chrome and Firefox have come a long way since 2006, I still prefer debugging in Firebug, and installing Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Tree Style Tabs. Firefox is my web browser of choice. However, Google is still my search engine of choice, and having one without the other is a serious issue for me. I hope that I will remember every time to go to google.com when I need to search for information, but every time I forget, I am sure that I will curse this deal.
Not only is chocolate labor-intensive, it's a terrible excuse for a plant. If its seeds are not spread by animals, it will either rot on the tree, or fall right next to the parent and compete with it. Also, at least in Central America, the primary pollinator of the cacao plant is some sort of tiny sandfly -- locally they call them "chitras". And it's not like they're growing this stuff on nice flat fields in neat rows either. Even after the harvest, you have to hope that the weather stays nice long enough to ferment and dry the beans. And then, as you say, they have to contend with a miserable pay scale. There may be worse occupations, but I can't think of any offhand.
You should have debunked Mandelbrot's Misbehavior of Markets instead. You understand Fama's efficient market hypothesis was a mathematical proof, yes? Where is your math?
Your price theory is obvious bullshit, simplistic on the level of "What comes down must go up." I hope that being a nutcase was worth your "federal conviction and permanent ban from the securities industry."
Damage to roads is usually considered proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. Cars are generally calculated to average 2 tons, even "big" SUVs aren't usually as heavy as their size might imply. I don't like SUVs either, but that's no excuse for bad policy. According to this GAO report, a fully-loaded tractor-trailer does as much damage to the roads as at least 9,600 cars. Fuel consumption is proportional to weight at low speeds, and at higher speeds wind resistance rises as the square of velocity; it is obvious just looking at the exponents that a simple fuel tax will not tax large vehicles in proportion to the damage that they cause. Taxing consumers as opposed to commercial vehicles is a terrible idea; it would have the effect of subsidizing heavy vehicular traffic. If we're going to subsidize freight, we should invest in rail infrastructure.
It's not what they believe that makes them intellectually dishonest, it's denying and inventing observations. Crackpot is not nice but it is accurate.
I await your wonderful discoveries, submitted to the appropriate scientific journals...
EU people have a hard time getting published, and never in reputable journals.
Whoever wrote that definitely fancies himself a scientist. That's enough.
This contradicts the above, and fancying yourself a scientist is enough for what exactly? Enough to lie to people? No, the important part of being a scientist is not dressing in a lab coat, having a PhD (the EU guys are in no danger of that), or making predictions. The important part is being empirical, testing your predictions in a methodical way, and adapting your theory to match those observations. There is no more value to what Thornhill and Talbott's writings than any other lunatic's ravings. If you want to cheer on pyramid energy, crystal therapy, homeopathy, or the Electric Universe, that is your business, but it has no place in science.
There's about as much chance of that happening as you revising your theory when it doesn't match observations: practically none.
I'm wondering what Talbott and Thornhill have been reading, or perhaps I should say what they have been smoking, because their description of the observations does not match the ESA's. It has lots of water and a dust trail, and while there has been some unexpected magnetic activity, there isn't some electrical bogeyman waiting to jump out at the lander — and it's not like the scientists involved aren't paying attention to such things. Apparently in order to believe in EU not only do you need to ignore a century's worth of physics (including Einstein), you also have to ignore current observations and make up your own. This is beyond intellectually dishonest and far into flat-earth crackpot territory.
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Karl Popper, Vol. 1, Notes to the Chapters: Ch. 7, Note 4
Paradox is not necessarily a fallacy, and blind moral relativism is not a good thing. There is no need to be tolerant of the views of murderous dictators, rabid extremists, or any other group which opposes freedom and tolerance. Resisting bigots results in more tolerance, not less (although if you're a bigot you might think the distribution is unfair).
Well if your asserting that I'm in denial of the problem because I don't like the solution, then in all honesty, you have to seriously consider that there are significant numbers of persons that have created a problem for the purpose of requiring their desired solution, such as UN Agenda 21.
Non sequitur. Unless you were trying to give another example of that same flawed reasoning.
They know that weather is an instance of climate, and if weather is chaotic, then by definition climate is chaotic...
This is a tired argument. The path of an individual photon as it travels from Earth to space is chaotic and unpredictable; that it will be either absorbed as heat or ultimately re-emitted to space is a certainty. It's very easy to make statistical claims about how often this will happen and how long it will take, and this can generally be confirmed by satellite measurement.
...some models are counting butterflies in a 22.5 km^2 cell and others in a 62.5 km^2 cell.
And some models are two-dimensional and do not use cells at all. You are very obviously not qualified to evaluate the usefulness of any of them.
Even worse is 70% of the planet is water and water is where most of the planet's most effective heat engine is, and there is almost no monitoring of conditions there.
This is an important area of study but it is a non sequitur in discussions of composition changes in the upper atmosphere and the effects on radiative transfer. The oceans are a heat engine, but their effects are confined to this planet; the other end of the heat pipe is not in space.
The bottom line is if we can't predict the weather 30 days out, there is no reason to believe we can predict the climate a century from now.
False. You can easily make statistical claims about weather more than 30 days out; in most areas in the Northern Hemisphere you may confidently predict that July will be warmer than December, and further make accurate predictions about temperature ranges given a set of historical data. Weather predictions on a daily basis are also frequently given as statistical claims, especially the chance of precipitation.
A further note on models would be that even obviously wrong models can still give useful results. A one-dimensional model will tell you what the black body temperature of Earth is. From that you can calculate the "greenhouse effect" of Earth's atmosphere, which makes the difference between a permanently frozen world and abundant life. A simple two-dimensional model can tell you what percentage of this can be attributed to various gases, based on absorption spectra. From there you can start calculating heat transfer due to convection and other effects, working from known physical principles, and mathematically describing the world as we know it in as much detail as possible, and comparing it to observations.
Your rationalizations are ignorant and false. If you're going to drag in a bunch of obviously wrong talking points, you should try a Gish Gallop. If you want to construct a rational argument, you might try arranging your thoughts around a central premise ('climate is unpredictable', e.g.). The best way to argue against a scientific theory, however, is with another scientific theory, but that requires you to learn something more about the subject than just what factoids match your preconceptions. Personally, I'm not really interested in responding to a string of incoherent factoids, so if you are still convinced you have some sort of rational response to make, maybe you can find some other forum.
I believe your cost estimates are greatly overestimated, but I did not actually address that subject. I don't really care what gets done or how much it costs, honestly, just that something happens. It's probably too late for my home to ever look the same again, but maybe yours will not be too badly affected. For more information about possible mitigation strategies, I would consult the IPCC report. However, you should know that your theory of no-feedbacks was the prevailing theory about seventy years ago, and it's taken a long time for scientists to come around to the idea that people/CO2 can affect the climate in a noticeable way; this did not happen without evidence. Everyone is hoping that we can find some physical system that lets us ignore atmospheric CO2 levels. Also, an increase in the global average does not imply an equal distribution of heat; temperatures in the Arctic have already warmed by 2 degrees C. There are a lot of other very visible changes, but I don't feel like going into them at the moment.
Simple models show that the CO2-water vapor feedback loop can lead to almost arbitrary temperatures; obviously that is not observed. Scientific predictions have their limitations, but my powers are even more limited; I know I do not have the decades of experience necessary to evaluate either the observations or the climate models. I would strongly advise against the application of "common sense" to massive chaotic system, however: getting the number of butterfly wing-flaps wrong could produce very unexpected weather conditions. To give an example, take a piece of Arctic tundra. You heat up the Earth, making the underlying permafrost melt. This releases a lot of carbon from sudden decomposition. The land then subsides and creates a swamp. Swamps are good at trapping carbon, but you've also changed the albedo so that the land absorbs more sunlight. Does this result in an overall warming effect, or cooling effect, and in what kind of time frame? The only thing that you can know about these sorts of problems without tons of research is that any simple answer is probably wrong.
Personally, I think that an appropriate first step might be to stop subsidizing oil and gas companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Another important step would be to change building standards so that heating and cooling are more efficient -- the cost of heating in an Alaskan winter is mind-blowing, just because it's cheaper for the construction company. Similarly, many homes are designed so that air conditioning is a necessity, rather than using passive cooling techniques. Hopefully electric cars will be able to compete on their own merits, but it would be nice to not subsidize auto manufacturers (the numbers I saw worked out to about $30 billion for the industry) to keep making internal combustion engines. Introducing some sort of carbon tax for manufacturers may or may not be a good idea -- I'm not an economist either, but I'm given to understand that markets are bad about pricing externalities -- but it may not even be necessary. It may be that if we stop giving handouts to massively polluting industries, green technologies will prove to be more efficient and competitive. If not, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
You're pretty much the embodiment of this article. Because you don't like the solution, you are pretending like there isn't a problem. I can't tell you definitively if there will be a huge problem, but the best available science seems to point that way. However, you also seem to be listening to extremist rhetoric about possible solutions, and I am pretty sure that there are a lot of very reasonable things that would improve world regardless of whether there was a climate change issue, and might make a significant difference there as well.
Also, notably, book titles are not copyrightable even though they may arguably be the most important part of the work. Neither are slogans, recipes, telephone directories, or substantially non-creative works. There are good and bad APIs, and you can do a creative interpretation of an API (a poetic reading, perhaps) which may be copyrightable, but the API itself is not a sufficiently creative work.
There are useless predictions, damned lies, and statistics all around if you want to look. Clearly the scientific community has failed to predict all aspects of the future. This has nothing to do with the evidence for AGW and you're disingenuous for suggesting so.
There is a very simple set of measurable facts that are the foundational basis for the theory. Solar irradiance is constant to within.1% as far as we have been able to measure. Carbon Dioxide is known to absorb outgoing long-wave radiation. Human activity has increased the partial pressure of CO2 markedly, extending the CO2-rich region further out into space. There is only one way for the Earth to radiate heat to space. That is enough to determine that CO2 causes warming, and what the direct effects of a doubling of CO2 will be (roughly 3.7 W/m^2 of warming).
However, it is well known that Earth has large reservoirs of a much more potent greenhouse gas covering about 70% of its surface. Given that warmer air can hold exponentially more water vapor, it is unlikely that the CO2-water vapor feedbacks will be anything but strongly positive. By itself, a doubling of CO2 would only produce about 1 degree C difference to the global average temperature. With water vapor and other feedbacks, no one knows for sure, but you can read the IPCC report if you would like to know what the current estimates are.
You can argue as much as you like about the scientists' moral character, about their predictions, and whatever credibility you think they do or do not have. The science is inarguable, and you can even measure the warming effect of CO2 yourself with simple lab equipment. The deniers need to bring more facts to the table. Unless they can poke holes in the fundamental theories of radiative transfer, all the rhetoric on either side is worthless.
Definitely a lubber, I appreciate the info. There's never been any evidence to suggest that the radar was off, and at midnight in a totally unpopulated area prone to foul weather, it sounds extremely unlikely.
It seems the citizenry were sold a bit of a package with the double hull tankers, although perhaps it helps with low-energy collisions.
Where did you get the impression that I was unaware of those things? I did mention the concept, honestly. I am just saying, from long personal experience, that the weather in the specific area of the Valdez Narrows and Arm is extremely unconducive to seeing anything at all, but especially not the celestial sphere. As a method for navigating a supertanker through those same waters, it is entirely useless. Tits on a bull, seriously.
Joe Hazelwood may or may not have been drunk, but he was provably not on the bridge when the ship struck. Also, he could have been drunk as a lord, and if the ship had not been a glorified Capri Sun, it wouldn't have mattered what he hit. Overall, his role in the spill was pretty minor. Blame Exxon for hiring him, blame them for the tanker's condition, the spill response, and for the travesty of justice perpetrated afterwards: Hazelwood might have had the official responsibility, but singling him out as a scapegoat only ignores the real problems of the spill.
Honestly, I don't know what issue people still have about this. Yes, it was a disaster, but so was the spill response, and either way it's completely invisible today. The salmon fisheries are as healthy as they ever have been, and there are as many eagles, sea otters, and sea lions as you could possibly want and then some. If you want to point out real, permanent damage, you might note how far the Columbia and other nearby glaciers have receded in that same period. That is the real damage that oil companies have wrought in Alaska.
Slashdot Mirror
The one someone threw at me in the last week or so was about a medical article.
Popular news headline: Marijuana Use Causes Brain Damage Confirmed
University press release title: Adolescents most at risk of brain damage from long-term, heavy cannabis use.
Actual research article title: Effect of long-term cannabis use on axonal fibre connectivity
It's not just expertise that makes you think that the news is misleading. Often times the news actually is misleading, intentionally. I'm not saying the American news media are collectively guilty of lying to the American public, but I think that collectively and severally they deserve a fair trial.
I've been using a Chromebook for a while. I am a web developer. This particular machine does not have Crouton or a standard Linux distribution on it, just the stock OS. I would probably have opted for one of those, but this machine has a broken power button, which prevents it from being put into developer mode. So far I have not run into any insurmountable problems, and I think overall that it has been an improvement in my workflow.
Chrome OS has a number of useful features. The longest part of rebooting or updating the machine is waiting for your browser tabs to reload. You may say that this is uncommon and that you don't care how long it takes, but on the other hand no one will miss that wait time either. Having files backed up automatically is quite pleasant. If and when you are in the unfortunate position of having a machine die on you, sitting down to any Chromebook and typing in your password will restore your files, bookmarks, browser history, desktop background, and all installed programs in a couple minutes. The biggest downside is printing; it's possible if you have another computer or a Cloud Print ready printer (yeah right), but it's not fun under any circumstances.
Tips:
Either Google Docs or Office Online do a pretty good job of handling office tasks, with one exception: neither will open a password-protected excel spreadsheet. For that I have been using RollApp, which does exactly what it says on the tin but is a bit slow. For web development, Chrome OS includes an SSH client. You don't need more than a VPS and vim, do you? You do? Well, in that case, you should be more than happy with Cloud9 Web-based IDE (Chrome Store link). You get your own little linux environment for each workspace, already set up for various development tasks. The editor is pretty similar to Sublime Text, and cloning projects from GitHub is fast and easy. You can also connect to a private VPS and do whatever crazy things you like there. Loading up a workspace restores all opened files and terminal windows, including any terminal programs/output. Run your tests, close the window, come back a week later, and the test output is still there. If you happened to be exploring something using a CLI interactive interpreter, that will still be running when you get back to it. Also, the workspaces are separate instances: developing locally I would always have to set up a new user, add it to the www-data group, set up its own fcgi pool, add an entry in /etc/hosts, and so on and so forth. Setting up lxc or nspawn containers makes this marginally easier. Letting your IDE handle it for you is brilliant.
Using a Chromebook does not mean giving up your ability to use (or create) complex software, but you will have to change your workflow. There is probably a fair amount of software that is not available on the web or even via SSH, but I think that most people's needs would be satisfied. I left my other Chromebook lying around the house for the roomies to use, and I don't think any of them noticed that it wasn't running Windows -- probably never used it for anything but web browsing. Your IT professional may need a XAMP stack, but he doesn't necessarily need it on a local machine, and there are some real advantages to not doing so, even if you skip the cloud-based IDE and just do a VM.
I have no connection to any company listed above except as a satisfied user.
I don't think that anyone would be so foolish as to say or suggest that THC does not impair driving skills, although the degree of response to THC is much more varied than with alcohol. I'm sorry you read something in my words which you found to be misleading, but I'm glad that you found the linked article to be informative; my goal was to provide more accurate information about the nature of THC intoxication and not to characterize it myself. It is clearly a complicated subject and I didn't want to either quote-mine or take the time to provide a balanced summary.
If I may be allowed to clarify the sentence to which you object, I would say that the GP's comment (the quoted one) was absurd on its face. As they say, the dose makes the poison. There may be some level of THC intoxication which is equivalent (by some measure) to the effects of a .08 BAC, and research in determining that would presumably be worthwhile. Knee-jerk ignorant anti-cannabis rhetoric (or legislation) does not contribute to a reasoned discussion.
Your link is misleading. Yes, marijuana does not do good things to developing brains — there are much better studies which demonstrate this. There is no similar evidence which suggests that either moderate use or use beginning in adulthood has the same effect.
Here is the actual study in question. Do note that their average test subject started at age 16 and smokes five joints per day. From the article,
The association presents compelling evidence for white matter reacting differently to cannabis exposure commencing during adolescence compared with adulthood...
One joint does not a pothead make. You've pretty much already missed the boat for pot-related brain damage, but your knee-jerk antagonism against cannabis users is equally as dumb. Even if everything you imagine to be true about cannabis use was in fact the truth,
I think that THC use and Texting while driving should have the exact same penalties as someone who has .08 BAC.
This does not follow. There is no objective evidence suggesting that marijuana is equally impairing, and suggesting that any amount of use or exposure to THC is equivalent to being dangerously impaired is simple prejudice.
When you can drive a starship through the holes in either theory, get back to me. I don't think we're actually in disagreement; I realize I was speaking imprecisely. I hope that you can forgive me a little hyperbole, and I will totally pick you to double-check my physics papers in the future.
No, I was not wrong, I am well aware that certain effects propagate faster than the speed of light. Note that gravity waves have not been directly observed. There are other quantum effects which propagate faster than c, but the fundamental constraint is that nothing can accelerate to or past c, and classical information cannot propagate faster than c. There are solutions to GR equations which allow for spacetime to be bent to the point where something that *looks* like FTL to fall out, but they tend to require exotic matter, and there's no evidence to suggest that said matter exists.
Finally, one must keep in mind that any form of FTL allows for reference frames in which effects precede their causes. You may feel happy living in a universe where causality isn't a thing, but that to me would put unpleasant limits on what is knowable about our universe.
This kind of comment is deeply ignorant and anti-science. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe. If you would rather believe in your own personal fantasies instead of one of the most well-supported theories in science, congratulations, you are yet another variety of religious loon.
Look, it's pretty simple. Science is not magic, and there is shit that it says that is for real-real not for play-play. We don't know what the future will look like in 2050 or 2100, but we can be completely sure of three things:
1) There will be no violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
2) Nothing (for all important values of nothing) will travel faster than the speed of light.
3) Commercial fusion power will still be 20 years out.
The first two are immutable laws of physics, the final one was proven by a Dr. M. T. Budget. Humor aside, relativity and thermodynamics have been proven at both the largest and smallest scales that humans have been able to observe, and at every level in between. They are not perfect theories, but they do place very hard and very real constraints on what kind of rabbits you can pull out of a given hat. You will not go to intergalactic space today, nor tomorrow, nor while anything recognizable as human exists.
You obviously have no idea why systemd isn't portable. Its whole point of existence is process management using cgroups. Shame on the kernel devs for not writing cgroups into every OS's kernel! Oh wait, that's retarded. And guess what else you can't run on Mac OSX or Windows? Your SysV init scripts. Hell, those aren't usually portable between distributions; systemd is more compatible. You're also wrong about GNOME; their continued policy is to keep the loosest possible dependency on systemd, and that only because they need the features of logind. Write a replacement, and they will use it.
Whenever other kernels support compatible features you can argue about portability. It sounds like you have some code you need to get writing.
Isn't pretty much every vote split along party lines anyway?
Note that while this sometimes fails to happen that does not mean that the problem does not exist.
So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.
If you can't define why this particular (loosely-defined) bundling is bad, then I submit that it's a matter of opinion, and I for one am confused as to why we're focused on one technology giant as opposed to another. Saying something is anti-consumer is easy; any commercial entity is going to be anti-consumer to some degree, most often to whatever degree they can get away with. Why is market competition not a good criterion here?
I've been using Linux Mint lately, and fucking up my system royally. So I've had to fall back on the LiveUSB installation to repair the system. Mint doesn't get a financial kickback from Google, so they ship Yahoo! as the default search engine instead. This has led me, by accident, to use Yahoo! a few times when looking for information.
I'm not saying that I would rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than use Yahoo! search; that wouldn't make my system boot. Was it worth it to continually type in 'google' and hit Ctrl+Enter before entering a search query? Yes, every single time, and I deeply regretted each lapse in memory. The only reason Firefox might care about Google is if they care about the quality of their search results.
For me, as a web developer, even though the built-in tools in Chrome and Firefox have come a long way since 2006, I still prefer debugging in Firebug, and installing Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Tree Style Tabs. Firefox is my web browser of choice. However, Google is still my search engine of choice, and having one without the other is a serious issue for me. I hope that I will remember every time to go to google.com when I need to search for information, but every time I forget, I am sure that I will curse this deal.
Not only is chocolate labor-intensive, it's a terrible excuse for a plant. If its seeds are not spread by animals, it will either rot on the tree, or fall right next to the parent and compete with it. Also, at least in Central America, the primary pollinator of the cacao plant is some sort of tiny sandfly -- locally they call them "chitras". And it's not like they're growing this stuff on nice flat fields in neat rows either. Even after the harvest, you have to hope that the weather stays nice long enough to ferment and dry the beans. And then, as you say, they have to contend with a miserable pay scale. There may be worse occupations, but I can't think of any offhand.
You should have debunked Mandelbrot's Misbehavior of Markets instead. You understand Fama's efficient market hypothesis was a mathematical proof, yes? Where is your math?
Your price theory is obvious bullshit, simplistic on the level of "What comes down must go up." I hope that being a nutcase was worth your "federal conviction and permanent ban from the securities industry."
Damage to roads is usually considered proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. Cars are generally calculated to average 2 tons, even "big" SUVs aren't usually as heavy as their size might imply. I don't like SUVs either, but that's no excuse for bad policy. According to this GAO report, a fully-loaded tractor-trailer does as much damage to the roads as at least 9,600 cars. Fuel consumption is proportional to weight at low speeds, and at higher speeds wind resistance rises as the square of velocity; it is obvious just looking at the exponents that a simple fuel tax will not tax large vehicles in proportion to the damage that they cause. Taxing consumers as opposed to commercial vehicles is a terrible idea; it would have the effect of subsidizing heavy vehicular traffic. If we're going to subsidize freight, we should invest in rail infrastructure.
Many people have babies, fewer breastfeed. You must be using a new definition of the word "fundamental".
It's not what they believe that makes them intellectually dishonest, it's denying and inventing observations. Crackpot is not nice but it is accurate.
I await your wonderful discoveries, submitted to the appropriate scientific journals...
EU people have a hard time getting published, and never in reputable journals.
Whoever wrote that definitely fancies himself a scientist. That's enough.
This contradicts the above, and fancying yourself a scientist is enough for what exactly? Enough to lie to people? No, the important part of being a scientist is not dressing in a lab coat, having a PhD (the EU guys are in no danger of that), or making predictions. The important part is being empirical, testing your predictions in a methodical way, and adapting your theory to match those observations. There is no more value to what Thornhill and Talbott's writings than any other lunatic's ravings. If you want to cheer on pyramid energy, crystal therapy, homeopathy, or the Electric Universe, that is your business, but it has no place in science.
There's about as much chance of that happening as you revising your theory when it doesn't match observations: practically none.
I'm wondering what Talbott and Thornhill have been reading, or perhaps I should say what they have been smoking, because their description of the observations does not match the ESA's. It has lots of water and a dust trail, and while there has been some unexpected magnetic activity, there isn't some electrical bogeyman waiting to jump out at the lander — and it's not like the scientists involved aren't paying attention to such things. Apparently in order to believe in EU not only do you need to ignore a century's worth of physics (including Einstein), you also have to ignore current observations and make up your own. This is beyond intellectually dishonest and far into flat-earth crackpot territory.
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Karl Popper, Vol. 1, Notes to the Chapters: Ch. 7, Note 4
Paradox is not necessarily a fallacy, and blind moral relativism is not a good thing. There is no need to be tolerant of the views of murderous dictators, rabid extremists, or any other group which opposes freedom and tolerance. Resisting bigots results in more tolerance, not less (although if you're a bigot you might think the distribution is unfair).
Well if your asserting that I'm in denial of the problem because I don't like the solution, then in all honesty, you have to seriously consider that there are significant numbers of persons that have created a problem for the purpose of requiring their desired solution, such as UN Agenda 21.
Non sequitur. Unless you were trying to give another example of that same flawed reasoning.
They know that weather is an instance of climate, and if weather is chaotic, then by definition climate is chaotic...
This is a tired argument. The path of an individual photon as it travels from Earth to space is chaotic and unpredictable; that it will be either absorbed as heat or ultimately re-emitted to space is a certainty. It's very easy to make statistical claims about how often this will happen and how long it will take, and this can generally be confirmed by satellite measurement.
...some models are counting butterflies in a 22.5 km^2 cell and others in a 62.5 km^2 cell.
And some models are two-dimensional and do not use cells at all. You are very obviously not qualified to evaluate the usefulness of any of them.
Even worse is 70% of the planet is water and water is where most of the planet's most effective heat engine is, and there is almost no monitoring of conditions there.
This is an important area of study but it is a non sequitur in discussions of composition changes in the upper atmosphere and the effects on radiative transfer. The oceans are a heat engine, but their effects are confined to this planet; the other end of the heat pipe is not in space.
The bottom line is if we can't predict the weather 30 days out, there is no reason to believe we can predict the climate a century from now.
False. You can easily make statistical claims about weather more than 30 days out; in most areas in the Northern Hemisphere you may confidently predict that July will be warmer than December, and further make accurate predictions about temperature ranges given a set of historical data. Weather predictions on a daily basis are also frequently given as statistical claims, especially the chance of precipitation.
A further note on models would be that even obviously wrong models can still give useful results. A one-dimensional model will tell you what the black body temperature of Earth is. From that you can calculate the "greenhouse effect" of Earth's atmosphere, which makes the difference between a permanently frozen world and abundant life. A simple two-dimensional model can tell you what percentage of this can be attributed to various gases, based on absorption spectra. From there you can start calculating heat transfer due to convection and other effects, working from known physical principles, and mathematically describing the world as we know it in as much detail as possible, and comparing it to observations.
Your rationalizations are ignorant and false. If you're going to drag in a bunch of obviously wrong talking points, you should try a Gish Gallop. If you want to construct a rational argument, you might try arranging your thoughts around a central premise ('climate is unpredictable', e.g.). The best way to argue against a scientific theory, however, is with another scientific theory, but that requires you to learn something more about the subject than just what factoids match your preconceptions. Personally, I'm not really interested in responding to a string of incoherent factoids, so if you are still convinced you have some sort of rational response to make, maybe you can find some other forum.
I believe your cost estimates are greatly overestimated, but I did not actually address that subject. I don't really care what gets done or how much it costs, honestly, just that something happens. It's probably too late for my home to ever look the same again, but maybe yours will not be too badly affected. For more information about possible mitigation strategies, I would consult the IPCC report. However, you should know that your theory of no-feedbacks was the prevailing theory about seventy years ago, and it's taken a long time for scientists to come around to the idea that people/CO2 can affect the climate in a noticeable way; this did not happen without evidence. Everyone is hoping that we can find some physical system that lets us ignore atmospheric CO2 levels. Also, an increase in the global average does not imply an equal distribution of heat; temperatures in the Arctic have already warmed by 2 degrees C. There are a lot of other very visible changes, but I don't feel like going into them at the moment.
Simple models show that the CO2-water vapor feedback loop can lead to almost arbitrary temperatures; obviously that is not observed. Scientific predictions have their limitations, but my powers are even more limited; I know I do not have the decades of experience necessary to evaluate either the observations or the climate models. I would strongly advise against the application of "common sense" to massive chaotic system, however: getting the number of butterfly wing-flaps wrong could produce very unexpected weather conditions. To give an example, take a piece of Arctic tundra. You heat up the Earth, making the underlying permafrost melt. This releases a lot of carbon from sudden decomposition. The land then subsides and creates a swamp. Swamps are good at trapping carbon, but you've also changed the albedo so that the land absorbs more sunlight. Does this result in an overall warming effect, or cooling effect, and in what kind of time frame? The only thing that you can know about these sorts of problems without tons of research is that any simple answer is probably wrong.
Personally, I think that an appropriate first step might be to stop subsidizing oil and gas companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Another important step would be to change building standards so that heating and cooling are more efficient -- the cost of heating in an Alaskan winter is mind-blowing, just because it's cheaper for the construction company. Similarly, many homes are designed so that air conditioning is a necessity, rather than using passive cooling techniques. Hopefully electric cars will be able to compete on their own merits, but it would be nice to not subsidize auto manufacturers (the numbers I saw worked out to about $30 billion for the industry) to keep making internal combustion engines. Introducing some sort of carbon tax for manufacturers may or may not be a good idea -- I'm not an economist either, but I'm given to understand that markets are bad about pricing externalities -- but it may not even be necessary. It may be that if we stop giving handouts to massively polluting industries, green technologies will prove to be more efficient and competitive. If not, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
You're pretty much the embodiment of this article. Because you don't like the solution, you are pretending like there isn't a problem. I can't tell you definitively if there will be a huge problem, but the best available science seems to point that way. However, you also seem to be listening to extremist rhetoric about possible solutions, and I am pretty sure that there are a lot of very reasonable things that would improve world regardless of whether there was a climate change issue, and might make a significant difference there as well.
Also, notably, book titles are not copyrightable even though they may arguably be the most important part of the work. Neither are slogans, recipes, telephone directories, or substantially non-creative works. There are good and bad APIs, and you can do a creative interpretation of an API (a poetic reading, perhaps) which may be copyrightable, but the API itself is not a sufficiently creative work.
There are useless predictions, damned lies, and statistics all around if you want to look. Clearly the scientific community has failed to predict all aspects of the future. This has nothing to do with the evidence for AGW and you're disingenuous for suggesting so.
There is a very simple set of measurable facts that are the foundational basis for the theory. Solar irradiance is constant to within .1% as far as we have been able to measure. Carbon Dioxide is known to absorb outgoing long-wave radiation. Human activity has increased the partial pressure of CO2 markedly, extending the CO2-rich region further out into space. There is only one way for the Earth to radiate heat to space. That is enough to determine that CO2 causes warming, and what the direct effects of a doubling of CO2 will be (roughly 3.7 W/m^2 of warming).
However, it is well known that Earth has large reservoirs of a much more potent greenhouse gas covering about 70% of its surface. Given that warmer air can hold exponentially more water vapor, it is unlikely that the CO2-water vapor feedbacks will be anything but strongly positive. By itself, a doubling of CO2 would only produce about 1 degree C difference to the global average temperature. With water vapor and other feedbacks, no one knows for sure, but you can read the IPCC report if you would like to know what the current estimates are.
You can argue as much as you like about the scientists' moral character, about their predictions, and whatever credibility you think they do or do not have. The science is inarguable, and you can even measure the warming effect of CO2 yourself with simple lab equipment. The deniers need to bring more facts to the table. Unless they can poke holes in the fundamental theories of radiative transfer, all the rhetoric on either side is worthless.
Definitely a lubber, I appreciate the info. There's never been any evidence to suggest that the radar was off, and at midnight in a totally unpopulated area prone to foul weather, it sounds extremely unlikely.
It seems the citizenry were sold a bit of a package with the double hull tankers, although perhaps it helps with low-energy collisions.
Where did you get the impression that I was unaware of those things? I did mention the concept, honestly. I am just saying, from long personal experience, that the weather in the specific area of the Valdez Narrows and Arm is extremely unconducive to seeing anything at all, but especially not the celestial sphere. As a method for navigating a supertanker through those same waters, it is entirely useless. Tits on a bull, seriously.
Joe Hazelwood may or may not have been drunk, but he was provably not on the bridge when the ship struck. Also, he could have been drunk as a lord, and if the ship had not been a glorified Capri Sun, it wouldn't have mattered what he hit. Overall, his role in the spill was pretty minor. Blame Exxon for hiring him, blame them for the tanker's condition, the spill response, and for the travesty of justice perpetrated afterwards: Hazelwood might have had the official responsibility, but singling him out as a scapegoat only ignores the real problems of the spill.
Honestly, I don't know what issue people still have about this. Yes, it was a disaster, but so was the spill response, and either way it's completely invisible today. The salmon fisheries are as healthy as they ever have been, and there are as many eagles, sea otters, and sea lions as you could possibly want and then some. If you want to point out real, permanent damage, you might note how far the Columbia and other nearby glaciers have receded in that same period. That is the real damage that oil companies have wrought in Alaska.